If you've ever stared at your inbox and your contacts list and thought about the number of people through your organisation who must also be in touch with the same businesses and contacts, and that it would be useful to be able to merge all those and figure out who the useful people are - well, so has Connor Murphy, chief executive of Datahug. His idea is that algorithms can work through your inbox and those of your colleagues and show you who you talk to and who you should be talking to. The company has been going for 12 months, and has already had seed capital and won a €20,000 prize for best startup in a local competition. Murphy, 31, runs it with Ray Smith, aged 30, an engineering graduate.

The product is one of the emerging generation of apps that rely on the "semantic web" - trying to extract meaning from words, rather than straight data. Murphy says that "your real professional social graph is sitting there in your inbox, waiting to be analysed".

• What's your pitch? "We analyse the emails coming in and out of the business to analyse who knows what - we give your contacts a 'hug rank' which shows how frequently you interact, and gives deeper insight into who you really spend your time communicating with. It's a web app, software-as-a-service, in the cloud. It shows you your real social graph at work. It's Linked In on steroids. You could use it to do seating plans at conferences - so they'll put people who work closely together next to each other."

• How do you make your money? "On a price-per-user-per-month model. Per inbox that we index. We're really looking for the big enterprise organisations. An organisation with 150,000 people at €5 per month would be the aim - then we can do deeper analytics across the organisation.

"People think email is free, but it takes 76 seconds to read each one on average and 64 seconds to process it. If you send an email to 100 people in your organisation that's 200 minutes cost across the entire organisation. We can analyse it so you can see who's putting the most cost on the company. We need to make people aware that time spent on email is a company resource and that it's expensive."

• How are you surviving the downturn, and will the problems affect you? "It's not really affecting us - our market is global. There's a Gartner report on executive goals which says their No.1 priority is building new and deeper and closer relationships with their clients. All our market research says there's potential in the US, UK and Australia. We're seeing costs coming down, and the government's still supportive of the technology sector. We're expecting to spend a lot more time in airports [travelling to clients]. We think there's going to be about five years of pain but there's going to be a lot of value here in Ireland. Everybody's got to go through the [economic] cycle in the next few years."

• What's your background? "I graduated in 2002 in maths and computer science from the University of Cork. Ray was doing a doctorate at MIT's Media Lab with controlling games with your brainwaves - really amazing stuff. We've known each other about five years. Then he joined Accenture, while I was at PA Consulting in London and the US. That's where we saw the problem: we were in big organisations but you couldn't leverage the contacts that people had throughout them."

• What makes your business or product unique? "The data is already sitting there; we put a rich layer on top of it. The 'hug rank' is unique - we've got patents based on semantic patterns. It's like Google's PageRank, which looks at which pages point to which other pages and builds its rankings on that basis, but to email. It looks at whether an email is sent to one person, or 50, how quickly it gets answered. It's a bit like Google's Priority Inbox, sure, but much deeper. I showed it to some journalists at the [Irish] Sunday Post and they saw the benefit right away. The real social network is sitting there in your inbox. Linked In might have a million business contacts, but how many of those are just pinging you to say they have? They're not who you really connect with. We can go back one year, five years and really give you a picture of your connections."

• Who in the tech business inspires you? "People in the Irish tech industry - Jerry Kenelly for all the time and money he's invested; Alan Coleman of Britebill, who's ex-Accenture and knows about enterprise-level sales."

• What's your biggest challenge? "We're a new category, so there's new positioning for clients - it's difficult to articulate what we do. We've got to get our elevator pitch right."

• What's the most important web tool that you use each day? "Dropbox, Skype, Google Mail, Google Tasks, Microsoft Azure, Amazon S3. My laptop could blow up tomorrow and it wouldn't make any difference. It's all in the cloud."

• What is Datahug built in? ".Net and XHTML, Javascript, JQuery, SQL Server, CouchDB in the background."

• Name your closest competitors? "Linked In, Xobni, and enterprise CRM such as Salesforce. We want to be a bit like Twitter, to have an API and have people build apps on top of ours."

• Where do you want the company to be in five years? "Approaching €50m revenues and 200 people, well-established as the leading supplier in enterprise relationship management, with offices in the US, UK and Australia."

• Sell to Google, or be bigger than Google? "We can get bigger than Linked In, and they've got a $150m valuation. If we got Accenture as a customer, with 100,000 people, with the statistics we're doing, that would be a social graph as big as Facebook, 500m people - they have so many contacts in so many companies. There are loads of companies out there and we can set up a mini-Facebook for them."